Taking its stylistic cues, as always, from the general time
period of 1888 to 1928, The Trepanning Opera sees the Citizens
Band tackling the subjects of medicine and health. Peppered
with humor and spiked with satire, The Trepanning Opera contains
a selection of songs that reflect on sickness, the field of
medicine and health care as well as the wonders and horrors
of the human body.

Imagine, if you will, an assembly of doctors, nurses and patients
who resemble refugees from a lost silent movie. They sing,
they dance, they hang from the sky, they contort and employ
an atypical theatrical flair to mesmerize, seduce, enlighten
and generally entertain, all the while reminding the audience
of the increasingly impossible cost of medical treatment. The
characters of The Trepanning Opera are weak with a myriad of
ailments, such as influenza, tuberculosis & albinism, which
send them seeking potions and cures from any available source,
including traveling medicine men and trepanation surgeons and
performing their own acts of self-surgery. They end up in a
third rate sanitarium under the care of two quack doctors,
who prove more interested in their own addictions to drugs
and money. Then, as now, those with cash get care and those
without stay sick.

Added to this is a lovesick wife whose husband has been sent
to war, a lonesome young soldier aching for home and a number
of returning servicemen suffering horrendous injuries and mutilations
from battle. These sketches of modern realities cast in an
almost other-worldly ghostly era are eerily powerful, poignant
and haunting. The show’s subject matter of inadequate
health care and of the painful loss of young lives accrued
by a country at war are told with the use of classic songs
like “Johnny Has Gone For A Soldier”, “Keep
Young And Beautiful”, “Saint James Infirmary Blues” and “We’ll
Meet Again” as well as original compositions.

The Trepanning Opera debut at Deitch Projects in New York
City in September 2005